Writing is a business. Nothing more than that. It doesn’t matter how great the story is nor what a clever little wordsmith I might be. 
If I can’t pitch the idea, that’s it. It all boils down to the hook, the copy read by that deep-voiced movie trailer guy: Deirdre Sinclair must come to terms with a moment she cannot remember, a past she cannot forget. 
I think I did all right in the end, getting the interest of three out of four editors, each of them noting my spin: It’s The Happy Hooker meets Born Free in the style of Cormac McCarthy. 
I gave them a minute to think about that and then went back into it: “She was orphaned as a baby. She’s into performance sex. And she has an exotic cat! A serval! Do you know what that is?” 
As my coach pronounced, “Everyone loves a cat. Does he live? Whatever you do, don’t kill the cat!” I couldn’t. I love that crazy cat.
Tag Archives: writing process
Pitch Conference: Part One
In the midst of a four-day conference on engineering the pitch, I take stock of where I am, in a complex of multi-use studios where others act, dance and sing, an ideal location for a Robert Altman film. 
The starting point of the conference is a work-shop circle, focusing on editing the pitch, ensuring the set, hook, complications, plot points and cliff hangar are in place, re-writing that again and again until the essence of my bad side is razor sharp or dead. 
The second and third days are devoted to pitch sessions, the first done in front of the group, the second and third in one-on-one speed meetings with my group leader as coach. There is a lot of sitting and staring, waiting for the door to open and my chance to go in. 
And when that comes – in the room for a second, maybe two – I can’t remember any of it except that I had said something about not wanting to change my sex and then went on about the wonder of science fiction, which my book isn’t, in other words, the bits that I would like to have back. 
Another session awaits, another chance to shine or collapse, and of course regret everything in the end.
The Partridge Family magic
The Partridge Family is a dated show (1970-74) – the setup, characters, story arc, yes, even the songs, all pure camp. 
And yet the magic of the show persists, some kind of secret of innocence left…
Shirley Partridge singing pure
The elixir found in the transitions, the brief seconds of music that open the show, take it in and out of commercials, right the way through… 
Pure, oddly so, opening an alternate world of interior childlike rhythms, proclaimed out loud, walking in the door, down the stairs…
not to mention a loving mom looking over all.
The All-Knowing Shirley Partridge
What was the question again?
The room is long, a rectangle of weak fluorescent light, smoked glass and metal slats, the desks tucked tightly together, bottles and urns in smart ready rows, cameras pointed at each other, waiting to blink. 
“I honestly can’t remember the substance of the meeting.”
“Strike that.”
The stasis of the event settles in at length, turns on itself, the focus on the banal, to prove a point – my point! – no matter what, to win the fight of fights, which is no fight at all. The door leads into a hall back into a room like this, another door, another corridor, this room again. The faces stare back, featureless, trapped in the dull light and sound. 
“No, don’t strike that.”
“What was the question again?”
“my bad side” book jacket
I’m off to another writing conference this weekend and have put together a first draft for a book jacket blurb on my bad side:
Deirdre Sinclair comes home late one night to find her sister’s drunken boyfriend armed and her prized exotic cat bleeding at his feet. She decides to shoot and asks questions, then fleeing the city to Canada. Dazed and injured, she remembers her tiny legs dangling from a high chair, her infant sister, Crystal, pulling cereal off the counter and their mother dead on the floor, pills scattered about her head. 
Deirdre’s journey with Apollo to the barren landscape of Newfoundland forces her to confront her fears and loneliness, bringing to mind her isolated childhood, her years at a boarding school and an aborted practice as a veterinarian before moving to New York in an attempt to reconnect with her sister. Immured in alcoholism, Crystal shuns her sister and keeps the world at bay with her boyfriend, Derek, a fire fighter who lost his company in 9/11, and who has developed a chronic obsession from working at the site. Deirdre makes a dramatic turn from working with abandoned animals to the escort industry and performance sex in her attempt to come to terms with her traumatic youth and a moment she cannot remember, a memory she cannot forget.
Young Adult Lit: “Manitou island”
I’m developing a screenplay into a piece of fiction for young adults. It’s a story of native legends and magic realism, set in Northern Ontario on Manitou Island.
It was bright and hot; it almost felt like summer. I arrived at the island in the outboard and saw my mother sitting on the dock with a dark thin man, an Ojibwa.
“We have a visitor, Gerbi.” Norma tied the bow of the boat. “This is Asawaswanay.”
“Mr. Norberg.” He bent down and shook my hand.
“Asawaswanay has come to us about the good spirits,” my mother said.
“I am the Midewewin of my people,” he said. “What you might call a priest or a shaman.”
“I didn’t realize there were any shaman left.”
“The Midewewin was forbidden to practice the traditional ways some 80 years ago. We were forced to hide our ceremonies. Many of my people came to reject these ceremonies. The Manitou were forgotten.”
“Manitou?”
“The Manitou are the spirits of the land. They inhabit the world, the forests, the waters, the sky, everywhere. The Midewewin communicates with the Manitou. They have spoken to me of this lake and this island.”
“Are you making a claim on our land?” I asked.
He smiled and then said, “We have no interest in the gold.”
As I have mentioned in previous blogs, research can be one of the greatest aspects of the work. I spent a few afternoons in the Ontario Archives and was lucky enough to acquire a copy of The Robinson Treaty. 
This became a virtual gold mine for both historical information and Ojibwa names, two of which I used for characters: Asawaswanay and Pamequonaishcung. 
The question is whether to shorten them or not. I think not.
my bad side: The Birthday Party
In the midst of polishing my bad side, I have had to dramatically edit – and shift – a key moment in Dee’s childhood, a birthday party for which she had supreme expectations. As part of my mourning process, I present the scene here unabridged:
Janey’s birthday invitation had a picture of a bearded pirate in a red jacket and giant boots; his arms were in a blur, throwing cream pies in a whirlwind at scattering parrots and kids. The invitation promised games and ice cream, treasure hunts and goody bags, but all I could think about was the pirates and their swords and chain belts, all of the thundering, spitting and swearing, and how we would run with crazy legs, the birds swooping over us, screaming and squawking, all of us caked in thick balls of cream and chocolate. 
I couldn’t believe that such a thing was possible. I lay awake staring up at the long line of light from the bottom of the window. I had crazy laughing in my head. I was going to be throwing food. I was going to be throwing pies. I was going to be dancing on tables and running from pirates. Everything was going to be crazy bright and wild. It was just so amazing. I had never been so excited in my life. I have never been since.
I couldn’t do anything that day. I stared at the TV, went through the channels, and turned it off. I looked out the window. I waited in the front hall. I turned Nani’s porcelain dogs around and around. 
She took forever to come down the stairs, and then she had to get her purse and then her coat. And then she couldn’t find her keys.
“Nani, come on!”
She stopped and looked down at me. “Dee, if you don’t stop this nonsense this minute, there won’t be any party.”
I waited while she found her keys and then put on her lipstick and backed the car out of the garage. She made the turn out of the driveway purposely weird and long. She drove as slow as she could. I tried to sit properly but I was stiff. My shoulders were too far back. My elbows were banging into everything.
“Is this Smithfield?” Nani slouched forward, looking at the signs. “Woods? Where is Smithfield then? I’ll have to turn back here.” We went around the block and stopped and then came back to where we had been.
“Nani!” I was going to get out and run.
“Stop your nonsense, Dee. Just stop it.”
I stared at the corner of the window, the black rubber bending out, knowing that I was missing everything, that the pirates were stampeding the room. It was hot in the car. I punched my elbow down.
“I’ll just take you home then.”
“I’m sorry.”
We turned and then again and were on a long empty street that ran to the river. We were in front of a brown brick building with glass doors and a black awning J & L Boutique. “Can you read the address, Dee?”
“This isn’t it, Nani.”
“What’s the address?”
“I’m going to miss the party.”
“What number is it, Dee?”
I looked up and down the street, looking for a running pirate, a stray bird, a fleeing child, anything, but there was nothing, just the number above the awning. “327.”
“This is it.”
“No, Nani. It isn’t.”
A woman came outside; it was Janey’s mother. I didn’t understand that. She opened the door and led me down a small set of stairs and then a wide room with a low ceiling and long checker-clothed table with stacks of Pittsburgh Pirates Styrofoam plates and cups and a bowl of plastic forks and knives and a green cake covered in cellophane. All of the kids were sitting along a bench against the wall, under a Pittsburgh Pirates flag and orange and black streamers. There were no pirates. There were no parrots. There was a fat man in a Black Flag
T-shirt and apron and two guys beside him, one with a wet brown beard, the other in a tight black shirt, leaning on a plastic mop. The Black Flag man waited until we were all sitting on the bench with our feet flat on the cement and told us to stay while the other two squirted globules of Reddi Whip onto the Pittsburgh Pirates plates. The Reddi Whip cans made crummy slurping sounds. The Black Flag man told us not to move, to wait until it was our turn even though there was nothing to do. The worst of it wasn’t that his pants were falling off his bum or that he was a liar. It was that he was allowed to do this. He was allowed to stand in front of us in his cheap Black Flag T-shirt and tell us what to do. He was allowed to lie to us. I didn’t understand that. I thought I had had something. I had seen the picture. I had seen it. The running pirates were there. The parrots were there. I had had it there in my ribs, my legs, my toes stretched out, big and tiny, my hands balled tight. I had had it in me, entire. I didn’t understand how he could be allowed to trample this cartoon world, this magic, and do this.
The Black Flag man told Janey to take her plate and she tried to throw it, but it flipped around and fell sideways to the ground, and then there was a rush and everyone was grabbing the plates, and it was just a mess, flimsy, slippery and stupid. There was a treasure hunt and sandwiches with the crusts cut off and peanut butter and chocolate ice cream and goody bags, and I had to wait on the bench for Nani to pick me up.
I took a can of Reddi Whip and smeared it on the Black Flag man’s pants. I was happy about that.
My new and improved mode of query
I recently attended a writers workshop on crafting the query letter and was amazed at the amount of feedback on what seemed to me a straightforward thing.
my bad side is the story of a woman defined by a moment she can’t remember. Deirdre,orphaned in her infancy, feels haunted by the death of her mother, she and her toddler sister Crystal trapped with the body for days. She fights against the image as she matures, struggling to find her direction and independence.
“Paint a picture,” one instructor insisted. “It’s just like a movie trailer.”
“So it’s a good idea to include character quotes?” A small voice replied (not me).
“No! Don’t do that! That’s bad.”
Now in her 20s, Deirdre studies to be a veterinarian and works at the Pittsburgh Zoo when she comes to own an abandoned exotic cat, Apollo. Deirdre starts a pilot school program, with Apollo as the main attraction, which, although initially successful, leads to a child being bitten and Deirdre having to flee to New York. She moves in with her sister and attempts to reconnect, but finds her immured in alcoholism with her boyfriend, Derek, a fire fighter who lost his company in 9/11, and thus bonds violently with her around their shared traumas. Deirdre becomes isolated and makes a sudden turn from working with abandoned animals to the escort industry and then performance sex. A shooting forces her to leave the city and embark on a journey with Apollo to the barren landscape of Newfoundland where she is forced to confront her fears and loneliness.
Requirements include: word count, genre, tone and ‘comps’ or comparable works, preferably films.
This 100,000-word work of literary fiction, a cross between Thelma & Louise and Taxi Driver, begins at the moment of the shooting and follows Deirdre in her journey to the north, using flashbacks as a primary structural element. Deirdre’s beauty and eroticism are central themes as well as her realization that, like her sister, she is not in search of understanding so much as is building barriers against what might be next, believing that she has nowhere to turn except within herself.
I was confused by the comparative aspect, thinking that using film titles wasn’t appropriate in the literary world. I was wrong. “It’s the story. Tell us the story!”
My writing focuses on thought process – akin to James Jones or Cormac McCarthy – capturing moments in a character’s mind while also giving the reader the latitude to bring their own perceptions to the work.
“Who do you think you are comparing yourself to Cormac McCarthy?” The instructor demanded. “That’s a pretty big name, you know.”
Like George Costanza, I didn’t have a good comeback, and now I wish I had been a little quicker. “This is your chance.” (Or is that as bad as “Well, the jerk store called and they’re running out of you“?)
After completing my degree in Literature and Film, I moved to Paris to write my first novel and have traveled extensively to enable my development as a novelist. Most recently, I have taken part in several Unterberg Writing Workshops (2005-09) in New York.
I’ve worked through 30 drafts of this thing now. Another 5 and I might be there.
Query Letter revisited
I am off to a writing conference later this week, focusing on how to write a query letter. I have had many versions of this, including a fictional news story as a central element, but I have settled on the following, for the moment at least:
Dear Agent:
my bad side, a work of literary fiction, is a story of one who has nowhere to turn but against herself. Two sisters, tragically orphaned in their infancy, have felt betrayed throughout their lives. Crystal, now 27, knows that she was borne of trauma and surrenders to alcoholism along with her boyfriend, Derek, a fire fighter who lost his company in 9/11. The younger sister, Deirdre, studying to be a veterinarian, arrives in New York and attempts to reach out to Crystal but drifts off into isolation, her beauty and eroticism leading toward a world immured in sex. A hapless shooting forces Deirdre to leave the city and embark on a harrowing journey to the majestically barren landscape of the north where she confronts the terror and loneliness in herself.
Set in contemporary New York and Newfoundland, a tone of thoughtful desperation pervades the narrative; the characters are real, the dialogue and themes vital. Deirdre tells her story with trenchant intelligence, contrasting her childhood against a present-day spectacle of carnality. Her life, like her sister’s, is revealed as a series of moments not in search of contact and understanding, but in how to build a barrier against what might be next.
My writing focuses on thought process, capturing characters’ words and actions in a moment while also giving the reader the latitude to bring their own perception to the work. This book in particular reflects upon my own distance from the world at large, developing my personal empathy for those who have been isolated and objectified in modern-day society.
World Boat Tour
I have always been fascinated by the idea of traveling around the world by water. 
It is an incredibly exotic and slightly terrifying thing to do. 
I am working out such a scene for The Ark. The question is which type of boat to use. Manpower? 
Windpower? 
Or horsepower? 